


Cathedrals in Potassium and Water

by icarus_chained



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Inception, Courage, Dreams and Nightmares, Dreamsharing, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Gen, Limbo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2013-09-13
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:07:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newton Geiszler is the best damn chemist in the dreamshare business, and Hermann Gottlieb is the best damn architect, but holy shit do you not want them to ever actually share the same headspace. They'd shared jobs, but never shared the dream. Not until now, not until this one. And look where <i>that</i> had gotten them.</p><p>Or: the Newt & Hermann Inception AU wherein they both get stuck in Limbo.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cathedrals in Potassium and Water

**Author's Note:**

> For [this prompt](http://pacificrimkink.livejournal.com/2747.html?thread=3248059#t3248059): Inception AU. Can be Gen, but if there is shipping please no incest. If there is shipping I am partial to Newt/Hermann (chemist and architect? Joint chemists? IDK your call), Mako/Raleigh and Hot Dads but yeah as long as no incest I'm happy.

It was widely acknowledged in the dreamshare community that Newton Geiszler and Hermann Gottlieb were the best in their respective fields. If you wanted precision sedatives tailored to any metabolism or desired effect, there was nowhere to go except Newt, and no-one on the face of the earth could create a simulated environment in a dream the way Hermann could. There wasn't a chemist or architect in the field better than them, and most people knew it.

Most people _also_ knew, however, that trying to get them both into a dream together was anywhere from a fool's errand to active suicide. To say they did not get on was ... putting it mildly. Less oil and water, Newt sometimes thought, and more _potassium_ and water.

Admittedly, that might have been slightly more his fault than Hermann's. He hadn't _known_ that the cane was the man's totem, had he? He'd just seen it lying on a table and wanted to see if the handle was real bone, which had kinda gotten them off on the wrong foot when the man had turned around and seen Newt apparently _messing with his totem_. That kind of thing put a damper on a relationship in their business.

But it hadn't only been that. They just ... didn't _fit_. They couldn't be in a room together without snapping sparks off each other. Hermann, Newt knew from long and screamed conversations at frankly unsafe decibels, considered him a reckless, slovenly, imprecise and childish asshole ("You test your sedatives _on yourself_ , Dr Geiszler, without any safeties at all. Do you wonder that people dislike dreamsharing with you? How many times have you gotten lost down there, with only a chemical timer to pull you out?"), while Newt himself considered Hermann a repressed, anal-retentive nincompoop with absolutely nothing going for him aside from some small skill with mathematical modeling ("Yeah? Well, I don't know how you managed to convince people you were an architect, _Hermann_. I thought architects had to have some _imagination_."). They were violent and angry and _hot shit_ on a job together, doing their best work with the other's snarls and sniping to egg them on, but holy shit did you ever not want them to share a headspace together.

At least, that's what Newt had thought. Before. Before this job, Stacker's little inception project, before they'd been roped into diving down into a psyche so fucking militarised that it threw up _kaiju_ as projections. What the hell, dude? And yeah, cool as shit, but not when they were trying to kill you. Definitely not when their 'chemical timer', as Hermann put it, was set to let them out entirely on its own schedule, regardless of what happened to them down here in the meantime.

Dying in a dream when you couldn't get back out was bad for you. Everybody knew this, though none so well as Newt. He knew it good and personal. Getting stuck in Limbo was _bad_ for you.

He'd only ever done it once before. The mix had been a touch more potent than he'd thought, the induced sleep deep enough to hold even through the rigged pulley-and-water-bucket kick he'd set up for himself. He'd been dumped down into the depths of his own psyche for what had felt like subjective decades. A lifetime. Maybe two. 

And it had been ... it had been a nightmare. Newt was pretty comfortable with himself, pretty cool with all the little facets of his personality and quirks of his brain chemistry, but living them, living out lifetimes of them in a world where any stray thought could call down literal hell, had shown him that the last person on the planet whose head he wanted to be stuck in was his own. Which is not the most fun thing you could learn about yourself, alright? 

He'd changed his totem after that, given up on objects he could hold, like Hermann's cane or Tendo's rosary, and gone instead for something more permanent. After Limbo, Newt's totem had crawled in lurid lines beneath his clothes, monsters etched permanently into his skin as warning and reminder both, drawing lots of funny looks that didn't matter one damn bit. Newt had seen Limbo. A totem he couldn't lose was way more important that what idiots thought about him.

He'd never told Hermann about that. Any of that. He'd never mentioned it when Hermann was ranting on about how reckless and unconcerned he was about anyone's safety, let alone his own, didn't he _realise_ what could happen down there? Newt had taken that one on the chin, every damn time, and never let Hermann know that he did, in fact, know _exactly_ what could happen down here.

He kind of suspected Hermann was realising it now, though. What with the whole dystopian hell-pit Newt's wonderful brain chemistry had just dropped them into. He sort of thought Hermann might have figured it out.

"... Dr Geiszler," a voice said above him, soft and careful over his huddled form. "Look at me, please. Newton. Will you look?"

"... Can't," he whispered, wrapping his arms tighter around his head. He couldn't look. He knew what he'd see, the backdrop his partner would be standing against, the hell he'd dumped Hermann into. He knew what would be waiting for him if he looked up, and he _couldn't_ , alright? He didn't want to do that. No way José.

Hermann was silent for a second, a stiff, careful figure poised above him, and Newt could imagine his expression. He could imagine the anger and the disapproval and the disgust on the man's face. Newt had brought them here, Newt had gotten them stuck down here, and now he couldn't even look up and face what he'd done. Yeah, Newt could imagine Hermann's expression, alright.

But then ...

There was a hand on his shoulder. Careful, hesitant, ready to leap away at any moment. Newt could feel the tremble in it, feel the readiness to snap back at the first sign it wasn't welcome, and the sensation just ... just wiped his thoughts away. Like an eraser over Hermann's stupid, old-fashioned chalk-boards, wiping out the whole worlds the architect had written in dust on the blank, black surfaces. Hermann touched him, hesitant and trying to be comforting, and Newt's world was wiped away just like that.

"... I don't think I can do this alone," Hermann admitted, very quietly. "I have been ... I have always been afraid of this, Newton. The temptation. The lives I could live down here. Dreams where I could forget my totem, because in them I would not need a cane." A short, leaden pause, while Newt's breath caught in his throat at the admission. "I know you are afraid, Newton. I did not realise how much, and for that I am sorry. But I don't think either of us can survive this alone." 

Another pause and then, so quiet it was barely audible at all: "Please?"

And shit, shit, there was a tremble in that voice, just like the hand. Barely there, tamped down under all the iron self-control that Newt had so readily called repression, but it was there. Hermann was shit-scared, Hermann was stuck down here where the nightmares lived (and, maybe worse, the dreams) and he was scared out of his wits. But Hermann, who had all the guts in the world, was willing to lay that out on the line and ask for his help.

Well fuck. What the hell was he supposed to do with _that_ , huh?

Newt looked up. Reaching up, half-blind, to catch Hermann's hand where it still gripped warily at his shoulder, grabbing and holding on for dear life as he pulled his head up out of the sand and looked, head-on, at the nightmare.

And saw Hermann instead. A weird little half-smile on his face, half-terror and half-camaraderie, one hand clenched around the palm-worn handle of his cane and the other wrapped tight in Newt's own, looking at Newt like he was the man's only hope of staying sane in a world where chaos waited for one unwise thought and he was currently all out of wisdom. There was a nightmare happening behind him, alright, a nightmare happening all around them, but for some reason, with Hermann standing between it and Newt, it didn't seem half so powerful and unstoppable as it had a moment before.

Newt swallowed, carefully. Wiping his mouth with his free hand, uncurling out of his ball of misery to flash the man a fragment of his usual cocky grin and try to meet that shy, stupidly brave smile with something resembling dignity.

"So," he managed, in a voice way too hoarse considering his body was made of _dream-stuff_ , for fuck's sake get it together Geiszler. "What're you proposing, Dr Gottleib? I keep you sane and you keep the nightmares away?" 

And maybe his hand spasmed in Hermann's as he said that, maybe it shook a tiny bit, but fuck you, Limbo was bad for you, alright? Limbo was never any fun.

Which was when Hermann smirked gently, that aggravating little expression that drove Newt _wrong_ when it was pointed his way in a planning session, and a small voice in the back of his brain chose that moment to pipe up: 

And Gottlieb and Geiszler should never be put in the same headspace, either. Gottlieb and Geiszler were suicide in a PASIV device, remember that? Only a nutter would bring them both on the same job. Limbo was never any fun, and Newt and Hermann would never be more than water and potassium.

Before. Until. _Shit_.

"Something like that," Hermann agreed softly, an evil little glimmer in his eyes, and then Newt couldn't even reply, couldn't even snark back, because that was when the numbers happened. That was when the world tore apart like tissue paper, the crawling nightmares flooding away like ink down a drain, and the best damn architect in the business wrote a dream from the ground up with nothing but the pure light of mathematics and a burning desire to make Newton Geiszler drop his jaw.

Which Newt _granted_ , hell yes, he'd never dreamshared with Hermann before, he'd never actually seen the man work down here where it counted. It was like watching a goddamn cathedral be built right in front of you, holy _shit_. It was watching a man paint you a portrait of his own mind as it drew down across your own, vast and shockingly intimate at the same time, and for some reason a savage, possessive jealousy swept across Newt at that. For all those extractors and point men and forgers who'd seen it first, who'd shared it first, for all those people who'd _touched Hermann's brain_ before he'd had a chance to. Right that moment, for no particularly logical reason, Newt had a sudden urge to grab Hermann for himself and plant some kaiju between them and anyone who tried to take him back.

In the distance, echoing across an ocean that hadn't been in their dreamspace a second before, something vast and alien roared out across the water. Newt winced, guilt flashing across his expression, and Hermann looked at him. With that exasperated, distinctly unimpressed expression that Newt would never admit he'd loved for years, and all of a sudden Newt found a grin stretching across his face. Rich and reckless and rock-star bright.

"Hermann, my man," he said, letting go of his partner's hand just long enough to sling his arm gleefully around his shoulders instead, "I think this could be the beginning of a _beautiful_ friendship." Because there was nothing better to start your shared lifetime down in the endless expanse of Limbo than the curdled-milk expression of one Hermann Gottlieb when presented with a paraphrase from Casablanca. Seriously. Absolutely _nothing_.

Yeah, Newt thought, arm around Hermann and looking out at the dreamscape and the shared horrors of two very different brains. You know what? They could do this. Fortune favours the brave and the crazy and the shit-hot brilliant. Bring it, baby.

Bring it on.

**Author's Note:**

> I still haven't managed to see the movie -_-; I'm working on it, folks. Promise.


End file.
